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  • From: Bearpecs AT aol.com
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [b-hebrew] Variants of YHWH in the BHS Text
  • Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 15:41:05 EDT

I've long lost track of who said what, but somewhere along the line someone
wrote:
> I am aware that many sources do not believe that
> this "it is written" form of God's Hebrew name,
> [e.g. Yehovah]
> was meant to be pronounced.

That is not correct. Belief has nothing to do with it. And the 'name' you
write is NOT one that Jews (I don't know which other "sources" are intended)
avoid pronouncing.

If there is such a thing as "an 'it is written' form of God's Hebrew name",
that would be Y.H.W.H. [I have placed the periods between the letters only
to
avoid actually writing that four-letter name itself because it is customary
for Jews to avoid writing that name unnecessarily.] Jews do not have a
contiguous tradition of how to pronounce that name. It has nothing to do
with
"belief". We truly don't know how it was actually pronounced. Until the
middle
ages, texts of the Hebrew Bible contained only the consonantal text, without
vowels.

There are a number of words in the Hebrew Bible which were in practice not
pronounced as you might expect them to be based on the text. The Massoretes
noted in the margins of the text what the correct reading was (based on a
contiguous tradition). This is called "qeri" [read], and the consonantal text
is
called the "ketiv" ["wriiten"] For example, in Deut 29:22, the word written
WCBYYM, is pronounced utxboyim, as if it were written WCBWYM. There are also
several words which are so commonly pronounced differently from what one
might
expect that the Massoretes did not bother noting them. For example, the word
written HW) (which would normally be pronounced hu, meaning "he") is often
pronounced hi, meaning "she". This is called a perpetual qeri. Another
example of
perpetual qeri is the four-letter name of God written as above, but
pronounced "A-donai", meaning "my Lord" (my hyphen is there only to avoid
actually
writing that referential name.)

When the Massoretes added vowels to the consonantal text, in cases of qeri
and ketiv they added the letters of the ketiv to the consonantal text of the
qeri. Thus, in the example above, they added the vowels of utzboyim (WCBWYM)
to
the text of WCBYYM. There was never any idea of pronouncing the word with
the
consonants of WCBYYM and the vowels of WCBWYM. There is no such word. The
vowels do, however, remind the reader that they are to pronounce the text as
utzboyim, i.e. as if it were written WCBWYM instead of WCBYYM. Belief has
nothing to do with it.

Thus, we do not know how the four-letter name was pronounced, but we do not
that it was NOT pronounced Yehova, Yehowa, or Jehovah.

(Notice that I am perfectly comfortable writing those words. The scholarly
reconstruction of the pronunciation of the four letter name, with vowels, "a"
"shewa" and "e", however is one I avoid writing because it might very well be
the correct pronunciation. If there is ever a scholarly proof that that
reconstruction is incorrect I could stop refraining from it.)




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